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Pocket-Picking

Stealing from the rich and from the poor.

“All classes are criminal, we live in an age of equality”: Joe Orton’s subversive mot came to mind as I listened to the craven upper-middle-class palaver of Harley Granville-Barker’s 1905 play “The Voysey Inheritance” (directed by David Warren, at the Atlantic Theatre Company, in a muscular adaptation by David Mamet). Granville-Barker, who was an actor and director as well as a playwright, was largely responsible for staging the productions that established George Bernard Shaw’s popularity in Britain; his own well-constructed plays display the influence of Shaw’s early dialectical and social-realist affinities. For this story, set in the mahogany library of the Voysey family’s luxurious country house, Granville-Barker turns the notion of property-as-theft into what the Edwardians would have called a ripping yarn. As it turns out, every stick of upholstered furniture, every scrap of fine food, every charmed detail in the affluent Voysey tableau is built on fraud—a scam perpetuated over two generations by successive heads of the family’s distinguished law firm—until Edward Voysey (Michael Stuhlbarg), the dour, dutiful son of the current scion, uncovers accounting irregularities in his father’s books and confronts him. “The firm is bankrupt,” Edward says to the beloved, ailing paterfamilias. “What have you done with the money?”

“The Voysey Inheritance” returns Mamet, whose “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” are two of the finest plays about the spiritual attrition of American capitalism, to his favorite subject: business. “You know what is free enterprise?” Teach, the punk in “American Buffalo” who plots to steal a valuable coin collection, says. “The Freedom Of the Individual . . . to Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit . . . In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit.” In “The Voysey Inheritance,” theft is of a more refined sort, and rapacity is hidden beneath a veneer of respectability. But, if Mamet writes with his pinkie finger up, he is nonetheless mining his familiar dark-comic mother lode of barbarity disguised as practicality. In order to protect the family fortune, Mr. Voysey (the urbane Fritz Weaver) has, unbeknownst to his clients, siphoned off capital from their trust funds and estates into his own account, from which he doles out interest, so that the customers never know they’ve been bilked. The strategy is a form of gambling; in this game of catch-up, the father bets that he can outperform the market, filling his own pockets while replacing what he has stolen.

To Edward, the discovery is a cataclysm. “We have defrauded everyone who has trusted us,” he says. Rather like a con man explaining the art of three-card monte—“Business nowadays is a confidence trick,” Mr. Voysey says in the original version—the father coolly takes his scandalized son through the accounts, a house of cards that has grown ever higher on his thirty-year watch. The fraud was what Mr. Voysey calls “my inheritance.” “I’d hoped it wasn’t to be yours,” he says, while rationalizing the crime as a heroic attempt to protect both the firm and the family’s name. “We do what we must in this world,” he says. “Was I to see my father ruined and disgraced without lifting a finger to help him? . . . Not to mention the interest of the clients.” Against Mr. Voysey’s slick defensive sophistry, the play pits Edward’s clear-eyed staunchness. To him, two wrongs don’t make a right. The scene builds artfully, until the jejune Edward finds himself boxed in by his father’s revelations. “You’re my partner, and my son,” Mr. Voysey tells him. “And you’ll inherit the business.”

In collapsing a five-act play into two, Mamet has shrunk the original struggle between father and son, especially the swaggering of Mr. Voysey, styled by Granville-Barker as a bit of a “buccaneer” who browbeats his timid, self-conscious son for his lack of business acumen (“You’re about as fit for this job as a babe unborne”) and for his bookish interest in philosophy (“Your ethics of this and your ethics of that, the sort of garden oats which men seem to sow nowadays”). By cutting back the family politics and making Edward a blunt, stalwart terrier from the beginning, Mamet substitutes combative urgency for social satire; he raises the stakes both of the emotion and of the brutality.

Mr. Voysey’s subsequent death puts Edward in charge of the firm. He chooses to expose the fraud, and devotes himself to recouping the money. The family is forced to turn over the bulk of its inheritance. The real bankruptcy facing almost all the Voyseys, however, is moral. The remainder of the evening savors the secret ambush of Edward’s relatives as they try to bend principles and justify their greed. Edward’s bombastic older brother, Major Booth Voysey (C. J. Wilson), invokes his late father’s bravery in dealing with “such a frightful task.” Mr. Voysey’s corrupt accountant, Mr. Peacey (Steven Goldstein), gets stroppy at the idea that he’ll be getting no Christmas bonus and at the implication that he is a thief. “Worse than a thief,” Edward says. “You’re content that others should steal for you.” Peacey counters provocatively, “And who isn’t?” The moral maze gets even more complex when Mr. Voysey’s best friend, George Booth (Peter Maloney), and the family clergyman, Reverend Colpus (Geddeth Smith), join forces—in a sort of class action, which Mamet dramatizes from what was merely exposition in the original—to strike what they conceive of as a Christian deal. They will not prosecute if the firm agrees to pay interest on the loss until it is made up. Their “Christian impulses,” however, are simply another push for profit. “You’d impoverish the smaller investors, in return for your silence,” Edward says, laughing away their modest proposal. His response underlines the fact that “The Voysey Inheritance” is, in the end, not so much about business as about honor, a concept that can seem almost Chaucerian in our soiled times.

In the Pittsburgh diner where August Wilson set his thrilling play “Two Trains Running” (in revival at the Signature, under the direction of Lou Bellamy), there’s little business and a lot of honor in the way the characters choose to lead their hardscrabble lives. “Two Trains Running” is the sixth entry in Wilson’s masterly ten-play cycle, covering the African-American experience in the twentieth century. In this play, which takes place in 1969, everyone does the math—Memphis (Frankie Faison), the owner of the diner, calculates the price he’ll accept from the city, which wants to take over his building for urban renewal; Wolf (Ron Cephas Jones) runs the numbers; and the jailbird Sterling (Chad L. Coleman) tries to sell his watch to get a stake—but nothing adds up. “Seventeen jewels! And I can’t get five dollars for it,” Sterling says. Even the demented Hambone (Leon Addison Brown), who was once promised a ham for painting the local butcher’s fence and was given a chicken instead, lives at the caprice of the white world offstage, which changes the rules to suit itself. The broken promise drives him crazy; he haunts the shop and the neighborhood, screaming, “I want my ham. He gonna give me my ham!” In Granville-Barker, the theft is hidden; in Wilson, it’s out in the open, in the impoverishment of an entire race. “People kill me talking about niggers is lazy,” the diner’s philosopher, Holloway (Arthur French), says at one point. “Niggers is the most hardworking people in the world. Worked three hundred years for free. And didn’t take no lunch hour.”

Bellamy, whose Penumbra Theatre, in Minneapolis, was an inspiration to Wilson, can’t duplicate the subtleties of the 1992 Broadway production; his ensemble is competent without being inspired. Nonetheless, from the first beat the actors project us into the extraordinary folk world of Wilson’s imagining. They hear his music, even if they can’t always produce the full heartbreaking power of his poetic sound. Wilson died this year; as time goes by, his work will be recognized as one of the twentieth century’s greatest dramatic achievements. His plays swing with the pulse of a people. “A nigger with a gun is bad news,” Holloway says. “You say the word ‘gun’ in the same sentence with the word ‘nigger’ and you in trouble. The white man panic. Unless you say, ‘The policeman shot the nigger with his gun.’ “ That’s magnificent writing. I left the theatre exhilarated, glad to have been alive in Wilson’s time. ♦